When the mode of music changes,
the walls of the city shake...
-- Plato
| How are the peculiar pleasures and intensities, terrors and disenchantments, of urban modernity aesthetically rendered and experienced? How do cities sustain artistic milieux and cultural movements? How do senses of place and the local emerge out of the global city? This seminar explores such questions through case studies of 20th century popular music in the matrix of the cities that spawned them. |
| By "musical urbanism" we refer not only to various kinds of urban music but also to a swarm of cultural and media forms that aided in their genesis, production, transmission, consumption, criticism, and mythologization. These forms include scholarship, journalism, performance, literature, radio, film and television - not to mention the discursive packaging of sound recordings themselves (lyrics and titles, liner notes, album art). We are particularly interested in examining the complex relationship between musical urbanism and larger economic, social, and spatial issues of urbanization. We frame our inquiry, therefore, with some classical but also wide-ranging methods of knowing and representing the city. |
| As a capstone seminar to the Urban Studies program, this course asks students to use the concepts, theories, and debates that they have encountered heretofore in their major as they explore musical urbanism through weekly readings, seminar discussions, written assignments, and special "lab sessions." Additionally, the seminar requires students to collaborate on a final project: an archival or ethnographic documentation of musical urbanism, analyzed through the lenses of urban and cultural theory. |